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Throughout his life Rousseau presented himself by turns as the citizen of a Republic, a stateless outcast, the resident of a vanishing homeland of the heart, and the focal point of an international conspiracy. He invented new foundations for political communities that could never be implemented or were misunderstood during the revolutionary Terror. The families he portrayed were both patriarchal and defiantly anti-normative. He affirmed his desire to belong and insisted on his irreducible difference; he extolled friendship and engineered breakups. Through readings of Rousseau's major political, autobiographical and fictional works we shall examine how and why communities, personal identity and citizenship are alternately built and destroyed. Taught in French. Course open to undergraduates with permission of the instructor.